Money Losing Its Value
What about the fairly recent price increase in goods and services since covid? Yeah, things you bought in supermarkets are more expensive than they are before covid. Why is the case?
We usually think of something got expensive when their price increase, but what can cause such price increase? The most common one we think, is because everything gets expensive, so it also gets expensive, without knowing why. Ok, that's stupid, but most of us wouldn't care about why, we just care that it got more expensive. That's it.
The more avid thinkers would came to think of its supply chain. Say, chicken needs to eat corn. Previously, corn is grown in the country; but climate change damaged the crops and lands, and corns no longer suitable to grow in the country, so they have to be imported elsewhere. Now, you're not only paying the chicken for the corn, but corn + import price. Therefore, your chicken increase in price, and it's impossible to let the chicken rearer pay for the import price himself/herself, so it's up to you, consumer, to pay the import price, to cover his/her cost. Or perhaps chicken eggs, this year, chicken lay fewer eggs in total (lower supply), but consumer still want this much eggs like last year (same demand), so demand didn't decrease but supply decrease, it increase in price.
Yet, that's not the only case. There's another case.
Ultimately, you need to understand that cash is subjected to lose its value. Yes, it lose value quite slow, but it can be very fast to lose its value. Is there cash that never lose it value, none. Cash always lose its value. There's a technical term for it: devaluations. Of course, there are other terms like inflation, hyperinflation, etc that isn't really important here. Let's keep things simple.
Suppose your country printed $1000, and it has 1000 goods. Now, you would price each goods as $1, so that each dollar can be used to buy each goods. If you price the goods at $2 per unit, there wouldn't be enough money to buy all the goods, and if you price at $0.5 per unit, there wouldn't be enough goods to buy. So, logically, the reason you print out money is you want it to be useful. If you can't use the money to exchange for goods/necessities, what use you hold the money except to wipe your ass with it? And how are you going to sell extra goods (rotting in your warehouse) if you don't have enough money to buy them all? Therefore, you need enough money to buy all goods, but not too much.
Next, suppose your country is going for war, and it needs more money to fund the war. Raising wealthy taxes isn't enough, so what's it going to do? Print money. When some organization has the ability to print money, they'll print it when they need it. Easy. Now, suppose the war ended, and money isn't burned, so there are now $5000 in circulation. However, you still only have 1000 goods. As before, money must match goods, so 5000/1000, you'd sell goods at $5 per unit (unless money is "burnt"). So, now your goods still cost that much. An apple is still an apple, just because it got more "expensive" doesn't mean its intrinsic value increases (without the case one said above, like import cost now included which before not). It's just because now there are more money in circulation, your money value decrease, each dollar can buy less stuff, that cause things to get more expensive.
Of course, to your "phew", this can't go long. Like a war or civil war is needed to wipe things clean and start again; or perhaps sometimes it can be done peacefully, though usually not. Why? When you're saving for retirement, and now this money printing makes your money less value, but you don't get more wealthy, but the wealthy get more wealthy (do you see salary increase when goods and services gets more expensive? Probably no, or at least not as much, in percentage, for the majority), hence wealth gap increase, which leads to more anger at the majority, hence more easily lead to civil war, or at least more strikes.
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